Happy Birthday, Simon Schama!; or, The post that makes this blog the nerdiest blog in Christendom

While all the cool kids are making a big deal about Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday today, we at The Post-Rockist have discovered that a scholar and writer of even greater distinction (at least to us) has a birthday tomorrow, and we’d like to celebrate it.

Simon Schama is a history and art history professor at Columbia University, the author of several books, and most importantly, the writer and presenter of the amazing, amazing, freaking amazing documentary The Power of Art (you can watch a couple of episodes on YouTube).

Some of us at The Post-Rockist (well, one of us) have been dorking out over Schama for a quite some time. Serial, I’ve watched The Power of Art on DVD at least 20 times (all 9 hours in a sitting, at times). Recently, Post-Rockist contributor on the Milwaukee beat, Amy Elliott, has also similarly been dorking out on The Power of Art, and found out by the grace of Wikipedia that our Simon is celebrating a birthday today.

And so a collaboration took shape, and led to the following song on the event of Simon Schama’s 64th birthday.

I’m guessing a vast majority of our regular readers (all 12 of you) will say “I’ve never heard of this guy” and if in fact you have never heard of him, then you would be right. But we couldn’t help ourselves, so help yourselves to perhaps the most profoundly nerdy post in the history of the internets.

Simon Schama

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Lyrics by Amy Elliott. Music by Scott Bragg. Copyright 2009 Pet Goat Records.
As performed by Scotter and the Happy Sunshines